Three diapers and a weasel

The diapers are used.  The weasel is deceased. These are landmarks on the daily commute.

I think something finally came and dragged the unfortunate weasel away. It took a surprisingly long time for such a small, portable piece of carrion. I can understand leaving a porcupine for weeks, with the spines and probably weird-tasting meat. But squirrels, equal in volume to the weasel, seem to melt away.

The diapers will be here for months. Adopt-a-Highway crews develop selective blindness when it comes to other people's turd burritos. The weather will remove the biodegradable component but the diaper itself will remain recognizable forever.

We continue to run the shop with a crew of two when it needs a minimum of three to cover all stations. That slows repair work to a complete halt on some days. Mitt Romney has been in town, but I haven't noticed a massive improvement in the economy, only smiling billionaires and their extended families enjoying the prospect of another beautiful summer in their second (third, fourth, fifth, seventh) home.

Many in Wolfe City seem to think his presidency, even if not particularly good for the nation, would be great for tourism. I tend to doubt it because the realities of the office of President of the United States will probably keep him occupied elsewhere most of the time and the security issues peculiar to Wolfeboro's geography will make it a headache for the Secret Service. It seems easier to me to place a security zone around a large estate with ocean frontage than to cut off a chunk of a lake with occupied shore front all the way around it. How do you create a zone of exclusion without pissing off a bunch of rich neighbors? What sort of scary surveillance equipment and even scarier personnel do you use to make sure no one approaches from any of hundreds of access points on the convoluted shore of the lake and comes in under water to within detonating distance of Mittster's compound?

So far, the president of France has pumped a lot more money into our shop coffers than either candidate for the presidency of the United States, even the one supposedly so smitten with Wolfeboro.

It tells you something about Wolfeboro and Tuftonboro's immense concentration of wealth in the summer that Romney bothers with the place at all. He and the family could go tubing, jet skiing, jogging and biking anywhere, but the weird big-money magnet of Wolfeboro brought a bunch of them here.

Their trickle no longer assures our survival. In the grand scheme I guess that hardly matters to them. Someone else will replace us if we collapse. We're not too big to fail. We're too small to notice. The few among them who ride bicycles do their best to sprinkle us with largesse -- not without chiseling, of course, although they've gotten a little better about that over the years. But as the middle class has shrunk and fashions in recreation have changed we have felt the loss. You can't live just on rich people's tossed snacks.

We do our best. I have to head out now, past the diapers and the grave of the weasel to grapple with the pile in the workshop.